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Defiance looks great and the creators have obviously put a lot of effort into imagining the world of Defiance. And then, yes, there's the game, in which I have no interest whatsoever. And the story so far has some interest, although the plots do lack some originality. But (sigh) there are just some things I can't get past.

I mean, what science fiction doesn't require suspension of disbelief? But in Defiance we have the "eight races." Sorry, folks, but we know now that since life appeared on Earth – starting with the evolution of DNA itself – the planet has gone through 4 billion years of random, haphazard, chaotic, often catastrophic changes, and that every species that ever existed, including us, is the evolutionary product of Earth's unique and incredibly complex history. What's the likelihood that the same multibillion-year sequence of events would happen somewhere else and cause organisms to evolve just like us? Way less than vanishingly small. Even if faster-than-light travel is invented and we roam the Orion Arm à la Starfleet, we will NEVER find Vulcans or Klingons or Romulans or Ferengi, etc.; in other words, there are no humanoid races out there waiting to make contact whose differences from humans are mostly cosmetic, like skin color, or funny Bajoran nose ridges. It's a pretty safe bet that anatomically, physiologically, and chemically, we are unique in the universe, and that extraterrestrial life, if it exists, is not remotely like us. So right there, Defiance's premise collapses.

What's more, the creators appear to have given little or no thought to subtler differences of the terraformed Earth. If the planetary flora has changed, what has that done to the atmosphere? What is the mix of atmospheric gases? Is there more oxygen? If so, do fires burn more violently? Is there less oxygen? If so, is everyone always tired and short of breath? Do atmospheric toxins shorten life? Has the chemistry of the ocean changed? Because that would certainly affect life everywhere. Is the sea still salt? Have all the fish died? What replaced them, if anything? What are coastal survivors using for food if not fish? How has the terraformed soil affected the atmosphere and the water cycle? What's happened to the ozone layer? Do people have to be concerned about lethal sunburn? Have some prey species survived whose predators didn't, and so they've overrun some areas? Is the atmosphere still transparent to just the right wavelengths of red and blue light to support photosynthesis? Have soil microorganisms changed, and what has that done to plant life? The creators seem to have forgotten that the basis of civilization is agriculture, without which we're back in the good old Neolithic days of hunting and gathering, boys and girls. Who grows the crops? What are they? Where do they come from? Are they safe to eat? Do they provide adequate nutrition? Have any fungi in the soil undergone explosive growth and killed everything for miles, depopulating whole areas? Where are all the little creatures, the insects and other arthropods without which there is no ecosystem? What new diseases afflict plants, animals, humans and aliens? How has the human and animal intestinal flora, without which we could not survive, adapted to the new conditions? Does everybody now have chronic constipation, diarrhea, inflammatory bowel disease, or intestinal cancer? You can go on pretty much forever thinking up stuff like this. A lot of effort has obviously gone into how the world of Defiance LOOKS. But, it's still early in the series, maybe they'll put more thought into how the world of Defiance WORKS.

Watching this moving, I was reminded of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. In chapter 5, Alice says to the White Queen, "One CAN'T believe impossible things." The White Queen replies, "I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Because according to Bart Sibrel, the self-appointed Moon landing hoax whistleblower, NASA spent 17 billion 1960s dollars employing thousands of workers and subcontractors and building not just spacecraft and the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers but an entire and HIGHLY VISIBLE technological infrastructure from scratch, in order NOT to send men to the Moon. According to Sibrel, somehow NASA managed not only to perpetrate on us dolts a vast deception but also to hoodwink an entire small army, from around the world, of scientists, newspaper reporters and magazine journalists AND their editors and publishers and TV and radio reporters AND their crews and producers and networks, many of whom had closely followed the space program every step of the way, up to and including Walter Cronkite and Arthur C. Clarke, neither of whom had shown any previous signs of senility or brain damage.

Does Sibrel really believe that we've been the victims of a decades-long conspiracy so shadowy, ubiquitous and impenetrable that it's worthy of the X-Files? Maybe for Sibrel this is a substitute for religion; certainly his obsessiveness about his Moon-hoax delusion has the intensity of religious fanaticism. Does he really believe that TWELVE Americans never really walked on the Moon and that NASA managed to fake not just one, but SIX successful lunar missions? Or does he know the truth and his poor excuse for a film is just a cynical attempt to gain notoriety? Because this film fails either as a serious documentary or as propaganda. It's so laughably inept and full of holes that it would get an F in film school. Is Sibrel not clueless that deliberate misrepresentations, scientific inaccuracies, and logical fallacies don't pass for facts? The film is riddled with non sequiturs. A few miscellaneous items are strung together and suddenly, voilà: A completely unrelated conclusion is presented and a figurative finger is triumphantly pointed at the supposed conspirators as if the conclusion were obvious instead of ridiculous. Several interviews were obtained under false pretenses, and Sibrel is clearly too thick to comprehend that the interviewer isn't asking tough and hard-hitting questions, he's just being obnoxious. Or else Sibrel was deliberately trying to goad them into losing their patience and their tempers. Then Sibrel jumps up and down and points: "See? He got mad. He MUST be hiding something." Sibrel is so self-involved that he thinks this part of the film will lead the viewer to see him as a crusading reporter or courageous whistleblower; instead, "detestable nut-job" tends to spring to mind.

But the film's real downfall is simple and obvious: The positive reviewers probably are far too young to have actually witnessed the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. If they had, they'd immediately realize why Sibrel's contention is bunk: Because most Gemini and all Apollo missions broadcast TV shows from space. If you believe that, then you also have to believe that we're able to create true zero gravity here on Earth and that THAT also has been covered up. You can create free fall in the Air Force's "Vomit Comet" for 45 seconds or so at a time, but not for the 20 or 30 minutes that the shows sometimes ran. Or else you have to believe that there was ALSO a cover-up of such advanced visual-effects techniques that a convincing illusion of zero gravity could have been created in a studio. Oh wait, I know: The astronauts stayed in their spacecraft in Earth orbit so they really WERE in zero gravity; they just matted the views out the windows afterward, and of course all of the astronauts had been given acting classes and were bought off. They were ALL to a MAN paid handsomely to PRETEND they went to the Moon. And the scenes from the Moon's surface? Oh right, they were done BEFORE the spacecraft ever took off so they could be cut in at the right time. And NONE of those astronauts EVER spilled the beans, not even to their WIVES or FAMILIES. EVERYONE did a PERFECT job of keeping mum. Everyone. Without exception. Since 1969.

While there is still a depressingly large number of Americans who believe in UFOs, alien visitation, and guff like that, a small ray of hope was published in 2011, when a survey reported that the proportion of Americans who believed that the moon landings were a hoax has fallen from 10 percent to 6 percent.

When Harry Tries to Marry wants to be like When Harry Met Sally (WHMS) but falls far short. Harish (Harry) is an Indian-born architecture major in Manhattan. Unlike most couples of their generation, his parents' marriage was not arranged, and unlike most of Harry's relatives, they divorced. Mom is an architect in Mumbai; philandering Dad is a fashion photographer in Manhattan whose own fashion sense is West Hollywood 1979. (The actors playing Harry's parents, Tony Mirrcandani and especially Zenobia Shroff, are awful.) Harry is determined to avoid this by having an arranged marriage right after college. Harry calls India "my country," but he has an American accent. One of many loose ends you're left to wonder about.

Harry (Rahul Rai) is 22, handsome and likable. His roommate Louis (Osvaldo Hernandez) looks like a young John Leguizamo. Louis seems extremely gay, but although he isn't, their apartment has two beds side by side, is neat as a pin, and glows with pastels no straight guys would choose. Conveniently for the plot, in class one day (which class? We're never told) the instructor asks for students' opinions about marriage. Also conveniently, Harry is chosen, and praises the advantages of arranged marriage "in my country" (see above) in a speech that sounds anything but spontaneous. Theresa (Stefanie Estes, who looks here like a young, blue-eyed Mel Harris) is sitting behind him. Her major happens to be architecture as well, although it's clearly not an architecture class. She is also called on and rambles a bit about love, etc. So the instructor gives the class a written assignment: "Marriage vs Mating." It's a large class, but oddly, only Harry and Theresa are teamed up before the class period ends. So you figure that the paper will be part of the payoff, because there's a LOT of study-grouping for it, but no, it was just a gimmick; once it's served its purpose – giving the main characters a reason to spend time together – it disappears from the plot. (These students don't seem to spend much time on other coursework, or in fact, on any coursework.)

Act 2 is supposed to remind us of WHMS but does so only in its clumsy editing contrasted with WHMS. Various combinations of Harry, Louis, Theresa and Theresa's BFF Mary (Caitlin Gold, a real scene-stealer) study or socialize. The transitions are poorly modulated. Louis and Mary have gotten together, you see. So we're utterly perplexed when Louis, right in front of Mary, brings the plot to a screeching halt with a long speech in which his difficulties choosing the right blend of coffee symbolize his ambivalence about commitment. We're even more perplexed when Mary doesn't dump him on the spot, or even seem to take much offense. The comparison with WHMS also fails because in WHMS, Harry wasn't planning his wedding for most of the movie, so Sally's willingness to put up with his idiosyncrasies was more believable. Act 2 also supplies some contrived confrontations that add little or nothing to the plot.

Meanwhile, Harry agrees to the very first candidate: Nita Shah (Freishia Bomanbehram). Wow, she's gorgeous, and wow, an architecture student too, only in India. Harry does most of the "arranging" himself because at first his parents won't help. His father wisely tells him to drop the whole idea and "live a little." But Harry's architect mother suddenly comes to favor Harry's marriage when she learns that Nita is the daughter of the municipal official who grants building permits; however, her attempts to curry favor with Mr. Shah are received with frigid disdain. This is slightly funny.

Theresa is clearly falling for Harry despite his thoughtless cruelty as he shares his marriage plans with her. Harry is clearly distracted by Theresa's sexiness, but is too self-involved to notice her or his own feelings. Scene follows scene with Theresa annoyingly running hot-cold- hot-cold. For heaven's sake, girl, fish or cut bait! And Harry, you idiot, forget about Nita halfway around the world and pay attention to Theresa right in front of you! Of course, that's the whole plot, isn't it? It's undeniable that people often do things they themselves can't understand or explain, but this is ridiculous.

Act 3: College graduation (usually a big deal in a person's life, no?) passes without a moment of screen time, and then we're in India for the wedding. The film goes Bollywood, with dancing, eye-popping costumes and colors, soaring boom shots, and whiny singing. Louis, Theresa and Mary have come with Harry. Did they pay their own way or did Harry pay? Why would Theresa subject herself to this? Especially if she had to pay for her ticket? Well, the plot requires Theresa to come so that Nita can talk with her and immediately see that Theresa loves Harry, but Nita wants to marry him anyway – right up to the outdoor seaside ceremony where Harry just can't go through with it. But it's OKAY! Nita UNDERSTANDS! SHE was rushed into it by her parents! Mr. Shah is, to say the least, displeased with Harry and chases him; they both run off a wooden dock and into the ocean, and then of course everyone either falls or is pushed in. In their ornate traditional Hindu wedding outfits. The action is laughably unconvincingly staged.

Epilogue: Harry and the other three go back to the States and Harry DOESN'T marry Theresa; instead, they're good friends (with benefits? They're not telling) who spend time together while Harry "lives a little" and learns more about himself and what he really wants. That's okay, but getting there was way too much of a slog.

"The Adjustment Bureau" is nothing new, so its success depends on how well it's done. The butterfly-effect genre, of which this film is an example, is based on a concept in chaos theory that relates the sensitivity of outcomes and recurrences to initial conditions. There are of course 3 movies with that name, but the genre predates the development of chaos theory; it goes all the way back to It's A Wonderful Life. Other examples include Sliding Doors, the TV show Sliders, possibly The Asphalt Jungle, and countless time-travel pieces including Timecrimes and Back to the Future. Ray Bradbury's classic short story A Sound of Thunder, based on (literally) the butterfly effect, was made into a film in which the original story is almost unrecognizable. The Adjustment Bureau conflates this with the conspiracy-theory hidden-forces-at-work nobody-really-knows-what's-going-on genre, which was the explicit motif of Men in Black and is also a theme (major or minor) of The X-Files, Rubicon, Area 51 and Roswell and most UFO stuff, the Alien films, Fringe, The Prisoner, Independence Day and on and on.

The Adjustment Bureau has the advantages of a big budget and major actors. It's set in New York City rather than Toronto doubling for Chicago/Boston/Seattle, etc. (although I don't know, these days you can do practically anything with CGI). The supporting actors are competent, especially John Slattery as Richardson. Matt Damon is almost but not quite convincing as Brooklyn-born New York politician David Norris, and Emily Blunt is captivating and irresistible as aspiring ballerina Elise Sellas. Blunt is 13 years younger than Damon, but there's a lot of that in movies and on TV, and their chemistry is undeniable. David runs for the U.S. Senate and at the moment of his defeat, he encounters Elise. He accidentally witnesses the activities of The Adjustment Bureau, which is a shadowy organization of seemingly superhuman operatives run by The Chairman (you're supposed to infer that The Chairman is God). He learns that there is a Plan that includes literally everyone and everything, that he and everyone else have their assigned roles in the Plan, and that sorry, according to the Plan, he and Elise are not meant to be together. If he doesn't like that, well, it's just too bad. If one's free will conflicts with the Plan, the Plan wins. Oh, and if he tells anyone, he'll be "reset," meaning brain-wiped. The rest of the film is about his attempts to find Elise and to keep the Bureau from separating them again, all the while working on his political comeback. The story is generally well told, although the narrative is a bit jerky and uneven in places.

However, The Adjustment Bureau, for all its great qualities, suffers from a fatal Idiot-Plot flaw: If you were David, and a woman just sort of materializes and Kismet whacks you across the face like a 2x4, wouldn't you ask her name? And then later on, when you meet her on a bus and she tells you her name, what kind of idiot NYC resident wouldn't ask her for her last name? And what kind of idiot woman wouldn't give it? Yes, I have lived in big cities all my life and I know about women who are reluctant to give out their last names to people they've just met, but good grief, she gave him her phone number. You watch this film and you scream, either mentally or out loud, "For heaven's sake, ask her her last name!" and "For heaven's sake, tell him your last name!" but to no avail. Also, the deus ex machina ending (literally, not figuratively) is a bit too neat.

Welcome to the town of Santa Ynez, in the middle of Absolutely Nowhere, America, home of endless Southwestern vistas and really, really dusty dirt roads. One day, for no discernible reason, there appears in and around Santa Ynez a driverless, really mean automobile that periodically roars out of nowhere, blowing its klaxon and running people over or driving them off roads and over bridges to their deaths and stuff. Maybe some demon or devil decided to punish this town, because Santa Ynez is also the home of one-dimensional characters, lame dialogue, laughable plot contrivances, cheesy special effects, and ludicrous overacting.

"The Car" had to happen eventually. In earlier ages, beings like Satan or lesser demons like Asmodeus and Azazel were imagined as fantastical animals or part-human creatures; so in our modern machine age, it doesn't seem too ridiculous for a car to be possessed. It seems ironic that a film with all that frankly Christian symbolism should have been made by so many Jews (the producer-director, the music director, the cinematographer, and at least one actor to name but a few)---especially since in Judaism, Satan is not God's enemy, he is God's prosecutor.

And in fact, The Car, as cars and demons go, is a pretty scary creation. But the car The Car can't save The Car the movie. Overall, this is a pretty dismal little film. The director and rewrite people went through the script and took care to delete all dialogue and plot situations that rang true. Backstories are presented and then ignored; what pedestrian subplots there are go nowhere. Nobody talks if they can shout; no dialogue goes just one minute if it can be padded out to five; nobody makes a simple declarative statement if they can make a wisecrack out of it. Tiny Santa Ynez has in the neighborhood of a dozen sheriff's deputies, most of whom seem pretty underemployed, and who are in the movie merely to provide convenient characters to kill off. The film carefully avoids showing much blood and guts, either to be less shocking or more likely to save money on stunts. Ditto for several other minor characters. The ending is only partly comprehensible.

Most of the actors in this gobbler have shown elsewhere that they are at least competent, but only Kathleen Lloyd seems able to rise above the dumb plot and the dumb dialogue to deliver an almost but not quite watchable performance. James Brolin, John Marley and Ronny Cox are all more or less wasted. The small roles do better, especially R. G. Armstrong as a wife-beater and John Rubinstein as cinema's most obnoxious hitchhiker. Those two little darlings from '70s television, Kim and Kyle Richards, appear as---surprise---sisters. To look at them, you'd never predict that they'd grow up to be two of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, or that Kyle would pass away of cancer after going to all that trouble to make her nose smaller and her breasts bigger.

Heroes is a rock-'em sock-'em sci-fi soap opera in the comic-book tradition. In fact, a series of paintings that figure prominently in the plot aren't really paintings; they're really comic-book art, created by an actual comic-book artist.

The show cheerfully mangles evolutionary biology as it gallops at full tilt through 77 episodes just chock full of action and stuff. The premise: There are people among us who are the products of "activated evolution." They look no different from you and me, but in young adulthood they manifest "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men," as they used to say about Superman: Super strength, super speed, flight, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, future sight, fire- starting, time travel, and all the other old standbys we're familiar with from comics and other popular media. The plot focuses on a disparate group of people who somehow find each other after discovering their powers. Some of them want to use their powers for good, some just want to be left alone. But mysterious forces are at work behind the scenes, manipulating people and events, attempting to exploit these people for their own shadowy, diabolical purposes. The characters in the story must overcome many difficult obstacles in order to (what else?) save the world from those who would misuse our Heroes for their own evil designs. This betrays a certain failure of imagination; having invented a group of very interesting superheroes, the creators then saddle them with the ol' evil-organization cliché. A recent series on cable, "The 4400," had some parallels with "Heroes," and while the series had a smaller budget and eventually ran out of gas, creatively speaking, it commendably tried to do something more original with its characters.

If you're the kind of viewer who isn't satisfied unless you can follow every single twist and turn of plot, then Heroes isn't for you. The show races from place to place, from character to character, from subplot to subplot, and back and forth through time with dizzying speed. Alternate realities and temporal paradoxes come so thick and fast that I had to give up trying to make sense of them. There is a lot of fairly graphic violence, and every episode includes spectacular special effects. But what I found most interesting were the attempts of the characters to cope with their constantly changing world. The setting shifts like quicksilver both in space and time. Characters lose and regain powers about as often as they change their clothes. (That plot device wore out pretty fast.) Many of them come to view their powers as more of a curse than a blessing as they must flee from unscrupulous, powerful people who want to use their powers for their own ends. When a character is killed, it's likely he or she won't stay dead for long. Characters are whipsawed by constantly shifting alliances and agendas, rarely knowing whom to believe or trust. They find themselves in paradoxical or morally and ethically ambiguous dilemmas that force them to make impossible choices between self-interest and the "greater good." They constantly struggle to control situations that are really beyond any kind of rational control. And most intriguing, they find themselves continually forced by circumstances into uneasy alliances with other characters whom they consider their enemies. However, the show loses focus in the third or "Fugitives" season, where the once-interesting moral struggles are blunted into one showdown or standoff after another.

The cast includes a lot of first-string TV actors, but Masi Oka steals the show as Hiro (get it?) Nakamura, the Japanese office worker with the cherubic smile, reedy voice, unshakable optimism and ability to freeze time and navigate the space-time continuum by merely squeezing his eyes shut and thinking hard.

The premise for this film is great: What would it be like to be part of a community of fewer than 200 people inhabiting the deserted remains of San Fransisco some years after a global pandemic? Unfortunately, the film totally fails to deliver on the premise. In such a world, one would expect the commonplace and the catastrophic to coexist, as they do in this film; it's just that the commonplace would almost certainly be nothing like that depicted here. The filmmakers seem to think that 12 years after the loss of 99% of the human population, a major city would somehow be magically preserved intact and undamaged, just as if it really were a quiet Sunday morning, which is presumably when some of the establishing shots were taken. More likely, San Francisco and practically every other city or town would be a burned-out ruin. The survivors' struggles would be quite different and much more in deadly earnest than is shown here. Anyone who is more interested in my extrapolation of what life would be like 12 years "since the world ended" may refer to my post in the message boards, since that would be too long to post here and since most of the other reviewers have contributed their quite legitimate surmises about how this imagined world really should look. If you're a first-year film-school student, this endeavor might be an interesting subject for critique; otherwise, stick with "The Road Warrior."

but does that necessarily mean he should film it and charge admission? This is another of the products of the fertile but loosely bolted brain of Lars von Trier. Don't be misled by the title: There's minimum religion and maximum unpleasant sex. There are really only two characters, He and She, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are both outstanding actors although I've always found Gainsbourg's overbite a bit distracting. He is a psychotherapist, though not a very convincing one, and it sounds like She started but never finished a doctorate that had something to do with the "nature" of women in art.

The movie consists of a prologue, four chapters, and an epilogue. It opens with a shower scene. Let's be candid here: Doesn't sex in the shower look a lot more fun in the movies or on TV than it really is? In real life, the water can be distracting, the shower walls and floor are hard and slippery, and the person who isn't right under the shower head quickly gets cold and shivery. Nevertheless, movie directors seem to love shower scenes. In this one, while He and She are having extremely rough and extremely explicit sex in the shower, their toddler son falls out of a window of their 4th-floor apartment and is killed. She becomes psychotic with grief and guilt. After a couple of months, He becomes dissatisfied with Her psychiatrist, takes Her off Her medications and attempts to treat Her as a patient. Big mistake. That alone indicates how misguided and stupid He is. The doctor who doctors himself has a fool for a patient. This also goes for doctors' families. He tries various forms of talking therapy, without much success. Maybe He is unsuccessful because it's obvious that He is a really inept therapist. These scenes are totally unrealistic. In an attempt to repair Their seriously damaged relationship, They retreat to "Eden," which is their extremely rustic cabin that is so far back in the woods that They have to hike quite a ways from the car to get there. Unfortunately, things go from bad to worse. There is a lot of disjointed, incomprehensible plot development that goes nowhere. She seems to sink deeper into madness: There's no other explanation for Her completely illogical behavior, which as written by von Trier is so random and implausible that even madness cannot account for it. He has strange hallucinatory experiences involving talking animals and whispering winds. He becomes increasingly alarmed at Her apparent obsession with the supposed demonic principle in the female nature. In the half-light of the deep woods or the dim lamplight of the cabin, as this hour-and-48-minute film drags on, He and She degenerate into essentially meaningless psychological "exercises," very graphic and unarousing sadomasochistic sex, violence, masturbation, mutilation and self-mutilation, figurative immolation, a full-Monty autoclitoridectomy with scissors that is guaranteed to make your skin crawl whichever sex you are ("Is this really necessary?" you ask yourself), and, finally, strangulation.

It's one thing to force yourself to watch a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, or Taliban atrocities, or what happens in a slaughterhouse, but should you force yourself to sit through a film like "Antichrist" just because you've got this notion that if Lars von Trier created these images, they must be worth watching? Maybe this film is too arcane and sophisticated for me. Or maybe it is, to paraphrase Shakespeare, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Maybe all the brutal, savage imagery and symbolism really is in the service of great cinematic art; on the other hand, maybe all the brutal, savage imagery and symbolism is merely in the service of the creator's self-indulgence, which is what I saw on the screen. Will this film stand the test of time? You be the judge---that is, if you're in a masochistic mood or are an insomniac looking for a desperation-time diversion.

It's a perfectly ordinary suburban house, and when Micah and Katie move in they seem to be a perfectly ordinary young unmarried couple. However, their nights are disturbed by things that go bump. There is an unseen presence in the house that seems increasingly malevolent. Then we learn it's not the house that is haunted, it's Katie. Apparently she has been stalked by this presence for about ten years, ever since she was fourteen. Or is it just the imagination of a disturbed young woman? Micah, brash and reckless, decides to investigate matters by making a movie of it (it's called "Paranormal Activity"), Either he or Katie is behind the camera, filming almost everything. There is a stationary camera in the bedroom that keeps them under video surveillance while they sleep. For all his puffed-up bravado, Micah is actually thoughtless and self-centered: He is less in love with Katie than he is with having a live-in girlfriend, and as Katie becomes increasingly frightened, Micah withdraws from her emotionally, becoming increasingly determined to finish his film. What to Katie is the threat of demonic possession becomes to Micah a project. The bedroom camera records bizarre, inexplicable phenomena while they sleep, which are all the more chilling because they occur in silence and stillness. The inevitable climax nevertheless unfolds suddenly and unexpectedly.

"Paranormal Activity" was "filmed" with a digital video camera held by the actors themselves, or fixed on a tripod for some scenes. It's meant to look like a home video much of the time, and it does, although the special effects, though minimal, are really quite effective and scary. Unfortunately, the filmmakers make the mistake of assuming that because it COULD be made that way cheaply and quickly, it SHOULD have been made that way. Forty or fifty years ago, "Paranormal Activity" would have been an innovative experiment in cinéma vérité. But in the age of YouTube and "America's Funniest Home Videos," with television sinking ever lower into the fetid ooze of banality under the weight of relentlessly proliferating reality shows, and with billions if not trillions of hours of home videos filling closets all over the world, a film made this way is just niggling. A number of scenes are also spoiled by the intermittently totally illogical behavior of the characters. However, one objection by other reviewers is unjustified: Why didn't the couple just up and leave when spooky things started to happen? Because, Katie explains to Micah, there's no point in leaving the house because the entity that is threatening her will just follow her wherever she goes.

Like a lot of reality shows that pad 10 minutes out to half an hour, and like a lot of home videos, the film is slow and draggy a lot of the time. I've just watched "The 4-D Man," a moldy oldie sci-fi movie from about 1960, and I noticed that the pace of the film was much slower than films made today. "Paranormal Activity" runs, or crawls, at the same slow pace. The filmmakers could improve it considerably if they hacked about 20 minutes out of it.

I remember seeing this program when it was broadcast on PBS in the late 1970s. While at the time I thought it was really good, from the perspective of 30+ years on its no-nonsense realism and breathtaking location cinematography become really impressive. I was also impressed that they found an actor (Malcolm Stoddard) who bore such a close resemblance to Darwin it was eerie. (Not quite so close a resemblance of Daniel Burt as Captain FitzRoy.) I never expected that 30+ years on, Darwin's theory of biological evolution would be under greater attack by ignorant Bible-thumping obscurantists, not less. I agree with everyone who has posted opinions regarding this series that wide diffusion and exposure of this story is more important now than ever. Here we are 500 years into the Renaissance and 300 years into the Enlightenment, and yet so many of the people I meet every day seem barely to have gotten out of the Middle Ages, and still others won't be satisfied until they have extinguished the light of true knowledge and replaced it with the darkness of doctrine. While it may be that the series has been withheld from repeat showing in the States owing to fear of the radical Christian Right, it is also possible that the lapse is due to some incredibly arcane and convoluted copyright regulation for which the BBC is so well known.

If you're an American reading this post, you likely already know that the First and Probably Only Season of Defying Gravity was broadcast in its entirety on the Canadian network CTV and that all 13 episodes have been posted on another website, where they are freely downloadable. Sound is OK but picture quality is suboptimal. This review is based on viewing all 13 episodes. iTunes offered episodes 1-3 for free at first; now the first 8 episodes are available for purchase. Netflix lists the series as on order; presumably you'll be able to rent all 13 episodes. Maybe Syfy will see a golden opportunity here to attract viewers by picking up the show in syndication and broadcasting the entire season. It's exactly what Syfy is looking for. It could even revive the show. (The sets were demolished anyway and might be too expensive to rebuild. Idiots.) And the fact that DG is exactly what Syfy is looking for, unfortunately, is the problem. DG aimed to satisfy both the hard-SF viewers and the touchy-feely contingent, and ended up satisfying neither. Describing the show as "Grey's Anatomy in space" didn't help any. Calling any show similar to "Grey's Anatomy" guarantees I'll avoid it like the plague.

In order to succeed, any work of fiction---on the page, on the stage, or on the screen---needs to balance plot with characterization. And preferably, the characterization should reveal itself in the action. Herman Melville's story "Bartleby" is an example of all character and almost no plot. In another of Melville's works, Moby Dick, the Second Greatest American Novel (the Greatest American Novel is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), the plot advanced every third chapter. The two chapters in between each "plot" chapter were back-story, characterization, or history. It worked for Moby Dick; Defying Gravity isn't up to the challenge. The show attempts to juggle the Past and the Present with a multitude of prolonged flashbacks, and, alas, can't keep all its balls in the air. The show does not merely develop characters in the flashbacks; it beats characterization to death. Every time the Present-plot starts to get interesting, the forward motion is interrupted by a flashback. I suppose the writers intended to build dramatic tension with this device; instead, the interruptions ruin the rising action. The ratio of hard-SF to touchy-feely in the show was about 40% to 60%; it should have been more like 70-30. Hard-SFers aren't willing to sit through all the ooey-gooey for some spectacular visual effects and good science mixed with really bad science. (The most blatant example of bad science, of course, is the instantaneous communication between the Antares spacecraft and Mission Control across millions of miles of space.) The show dragged noticeably a lot of the time. It shouldn't take 13 episodes to get to Venus.

Oh well, the Antares is probably doomed to continue in its orbit around Venus until the orbit decays and it burns up in the Venusian atmosphere with all hands aboard.

The Cold War years of the 1960s were the "golden age" of James Bond and the espionage genre. On TV, there was "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," "Mission: Impossible," even "Get Smart" and some other shows best forgotten, such as "Mr. Terrific" and "Captain Nice." I first saw Patrick McGoohan when he played the dour, grim spy John Drake in "Secret Agent," a slightly modified version of "Danger Man" from Lew Grade's ITC. Sometime in the late 1960s, we saw McGoohan again---even grimmer and more dour, if possible---in a bizarre British "spy" series: "The Prisoner," also from ITC.

We Americans didn't see the same show the Brits saw. In those days, a typical season ran 13 weeks. "The Prisoner" was 18 hours long (16 hour-long episodes and a final 2-parter). A run of "The Prisoner" would always omit several episodes. Neither did we see complete shows, because each episode's running time was longer than U.S. shows owing to shorter and less frequent commercial breaks in the UK, so the episodes that did air were trimmed. The entire series was broadcast in later years, most notably on commercial-free PBS stations in the early 1980s. Even then, we didn't see quite the same show: The British PAL broadcasting system, with its higher number of lines, has a sharper picture and cleaner colors than the U.S.'s NTSC system. With the advent of all-digital and high-def TV, this difference may disappear. But what about the show itself?

The plot: A high-ranking British secret agent, whose name is never revealed, barges into the agency offices. He is indignant. There is no audio, but he appears to be telling his superior why he is fed up or outraged before he slams a letter of resignation down on the desk. But no, he hasn't said why. He goes home and packs for a trip, presumably to get away from it all. However, he knows too much for his own good, and mysterious forces are at work: While packing, he is knocked out by gas. When he awakens, he finds himself a resident on an island inhabited by others like himself: They possess information that makes them too risky to allow to return to a normal life. What looks like a beautiful resort is actually an elaborate, Kafkaesque prison called simply "The Village." The inmates do not have names, only Numbers. The protagonist is Number 6. (We never meet Numbers 3, 4 or 5. I speculated that future Number 2s are brought in at Number 5 and advance to 4, 3 and then 2 as each successive Number 2 bites the dust from week to week.) Escape is nearly impossible. The administrator of The Village is Number 2. (The identity of Number 1 is revealed---after a fashion---only near the end of the final episode.) In every episode, Number 2 devises an intricate scheme to induce Number 6 to reveal why he resigned, and in every episode, he or she fails and is replaced with a new Number 2. Number 6 is The Village's most strong-willed, stiff-necked, recalcitrant inmate, foiling every episode's plot to get him to submit, outwitting his captors in every way except one: His every attempt at escape ultimately fails. Every episode's opening credits end with The Prisoner shouting defiantly at his warders: "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

This, of course, is the theme of the show. The Prisoner's reason for resigning, with which his captors are obsessed, is merely the "gimmick," or what Hitchcock liked to call The MacGuffin, i.e., a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise. Like the world of George Orwell's "1984," The Village was a vehicle for McGoohan's musings on the modern conflict between totalitarianism, soulless conformity and regimentation on one side and personal identity, freedom, democracy, and the uses of education, science, art and technology on the other. McGoohan succeeded in creating a watchable imaginary world, with Orwellian dialogue and a visual style slightly reminiscent of early Fellini, at the same time as the plots and plot devices were often sublimely silly verging on nonsensical. The main piece of silliness is that never once does The Prisoner say his own name. Nor does anyone else! There is even one episode where he manages to escape back to London (before being tricked back onto the island), and the script contortions that ensue so that none of the other character says his name either are truly ridiculous. In the 2-part final episode, Number 6's captors acknowledge that he has maintained his individuality despite all their attempts to wrest it from him, and grant him what he has sought from the beginning: To find out who is the true master of The Village; to meet Number 1. This episode abandons all pretense at realism and becomes an often nightmarish roller-coaster ride through a succession of images that leave the viewer wondering just what in the world is going on. In the end, "The Prisoner" lets the viewer down. McGoohan seems to have run out of ideas and could not figure out a way to end the series convincingly, so he resorted to surrealistic silliness and hoped that everyone would be so dazzled by it that they wouldn't turn off the TV at the end thinking, "Makes no sense at all."

Now that "The Prisoner" is available on DVD, I would recommend that if you're interested, you should watch it once just to see what all the fuss is about.

Although I grew up in California, among the places I've lived was a suburb of Detroit from '89 to '92. I lived on the top floor of a seven-story apartment building. I was too cheap to get cable so I just used a rabbit-ears antenna. With it angled properly, I got good reception of the CBC television station across the river in Windsor, Ontario. I am not a fan of lawyer or doctor shows, and this was the era of "L.A. Law," which I did my best to ignore. But I became a Friday night addict of "Street Legal," the adventures and misadventures of a Toronto law firm.

At the time I didn't realize what a big deal "Street Legal" was: A big-budget weekly drama series that was 100% Canadian, 100% CBC-produced. I didn't really care. I loved the Toronto street scenes. I didn't care that it was really a flashy soap opera. I didn't care that Waspish Eric Peterson was ridiculously miscast as the Jewish lawyer Leon Robinovitch. I didn't care that Cynthia Dale, Anthony Sherwood and C. David Johnson all suffered from severe cases of terminal overacting. Maria del Mar was gorgeous in those days. So was Pamela Sinha (Wanda). Albert Schultz played a sort of heavy on the show, but this was the same actor who is so hilarious as Arnie Dogan on the Red Green Show. Ditto for Gordon Pinsent (Hap Shaughnessy on the Red Green Show). Then there were the guests: Eric McCormack (Will), David Elliott as Nick Del Gado, Maury Chaykin, Joseph Bottoms as an American actor (big stretch there), Mimi Kuzyk, who appeared in a number of episodes of Hill Street Blues, Wendy Crewson, Tantoo Cardinal, Donnelly Rhodes, the stunning Sharry Flett, Kim Coates (who is frequently hired by Kevin Costner in supporting roles in his movies), Al Waxman, and various others. I was always amazed at how the writers always got Chuck Tchobanian out of whatever predicament he'd gotten himself into at the last minute. I loved it when Leon ran for mayor of Toronto. In 1992 I moved to Houston and that was the last I ever saw of "Street Legal" except for a few tapes I made. As far as I can tell, it's not available on DVD. (Sigh)

What "The Lost Room" does best is to create a convincing, internally consistent world hidden from the rest of us that actually does draw the viewer in and has you half believing that it could all really exist.

The old Route 66, that most American of roads, runs through Oklahoma City, where I live. When the Interstates were built, automobile travel got faster but much more sterile, and these days, anyone who travels widely in this country ought to be appalled by the numbing sameness of almost everywhere you look.

The setup: In May of 1961, a perfectly ordinary man, one Eddie McCleister, was traveling west along Route 66 by Greyhound Bus toward his home in Willowview, Arizona. On May 4, he stopped along the way at the tiny Sunshine Motel outside of Gallup, N.M. and rented Room 10. At 1:20 p.m. on that day, while he was in the room, an unknown Event occurred that altered space-time, removing the room from ordinary reality. Since the Event, the Room has remained in a sort of interdimensional stasis, unchanged from its condition at the moment of the Event. McCleister was able to leave the room, but found himself in a world where he had seemingly never existed. His "ravings" got him locked up as a John Doe in a mental institution and forgotten. He was now the indestructible, never-aging Occupant, although the fact that he never gets any older does not seem to arouse the curiosity of the staff at the institution (a big plot hole). The hundred or so commonplace objects in his possession at the time of the Event were transformed into indestructible Objects, each of which has a supernatural, often quirky, power or property. When combined, their properties multiply and change. Apparently the Event did not escape the notice of Mrs. Conroy, the manager of the Sunshine Motel, who in 1966, having retrieved seven Objects, tried to recreate or approximate the Event by opening a "tear in reality" at the entrance to Room 9. The experiment was a disaster. The motel went out of business and is today abandoned and derelict.

The plot: Ever since the Event, the Room and its Objects have been the obsession of a hidden subculture of Object-seekers. These people have organized themselves into "cabals" which war with one another over the Objects. Religious fanaticism, unbridled greed, lust for power and money, conspiracy, violence and death surround the Objects and their properties. Pittsburgh homicide detective Joe Miller (Peter Krause) is introduced to this secret world when he unwittingly acquires one of the most powerful and coveted Objects: the Key to the Room. The Key opens any door anywhere that has a pin-tumbler lock. When you open that door, you find yourself in the Room. You can transport yourself to any location in the world by visualizing it as you leave the Room. Shortly after coming into possession of the Key, Miller finds his life turned upside down when his young daughter becomes lost in the Room. As he seeks to recover his daughter, Miller becomes the target of shadowy figures who will stop at nothing to retrieve the Key, his only hope of rescuing her. Along the way he encounters a bizarre assortment of nuts, kooks, oddballs and cranks whose lives have been forever changed---often ruined, but nevertheless held in thrall---by their involvement with the Objects. Some of these people Miller must fight, others outwit, and with still others form alliances, to get his daughter back.

"The Lost Room" is mostly entertaining and fairly impressive. It must have appealed to the Sci-Fi Channel as a concept because although it has a large cast and many locations, it was not a budget-buster because the locations are not particularly exotic, and the special effects are actually quite limited. The plot is mostly pretty solid and the dialogue mostly effective. There are some really major blunders, however, as when you're expected to believe that a man could remove his own eye and replace it with a glass eye with just a scalpel and some local anesthetic. Show that clip to a roomful of surgeons and it would probably get laughed off the screen. Others are when Miller finds the Occupant in a mental institution that almost seems to have been kept open only for that one inmate, that no one at the institution seems to notice or care that the Occupant never ages, that Miller would be allowed to enter the Occupant's cell with a loaded gun, and that he could simply leave the asylum with the Occupant and drive off without a lot of police chasing him for abducting a crazy man. Also, if you watch the show with the closed captions turned on, you'll notice that many lines of dialogue on the sound track are different from the closed captions, suggesting that a last rewrite and relooping were done after the closed captions were typed up. The last scene is a clear setup for a series to follow, which I would watch.

"The Last Mimzy" is not so much based on, more inspired by, a classic SF short story, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym used by authors and spouses Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), which was itself inspired by Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass." That children are different from adults isn't news to parents, but no author(s) ever took that notion and ran further with it than Kuttner and Moore. They must have found their kids deeply weird, or vice versa.

The original short story begins millions of years in the future. The human race has found some kind of higher plane of existence, which they prefer to our own. People begin life in our ordinary sphere, but in early childhood learn the technique of crossing over "from Earth." They are taught to do this by educational "toys." An ingenious but eccentric scientist of that distant future invents a Box, a kind of time machine. Having turned on the power, he realizes that the Box is empty. The device needs a control, a 3-dimensional solid that will react to the conditions of another age so that on its return he can tell where and when it has been. By chance, near at hand are some of his son's old "toys." He stuffs some into the Box just before it vanishes into the past. It does not return. Eventually he builds another Box, filling it with the rest of his son's "toys." He sets it to travel to late-19th-century Earth. It does not return either, after which the scientist abandons the project. (The authors do not explain why his son brought his "toys" along "from Earth" if he didn't need them any more. Also, although they brilliantly imagined the "toys" as futuristic devices, they somehow could not envision a time machine equipped with miniature devices for recording picture, sound, and environmental conditions at the target site. But then they wouldn't have had a story, would they?) The second Box actually winds up in Oxford about 1862, where it is found by none other than Alice Liddell. Charles Dodgson (Carroll) records fragments of what Alice has learned from the "toys" and works them into the Alice books, especially the poem "Jabberwocky." The first verse of the poem is Alice's interpretation of the crucial datum that makes possible the technique of crossing over. But Alice Liddell is already too old, and never fully masters the technique. The first Box appears on the outskirts of an American university town in the spring of 1942, where it is found by 7-year-old Scott Paradine, the son of a college professor. He and his toddler sister Emma also learn from their "toys." Eventually, their strange behavior concerns their father, who is naturally baffled by the "toys" when he tries to investigate their properties. After conferring with a psychologist who spouts very trendy Forties psychobabble, the parents become alarmed, and take away the "toys." But it's too late: Scott and Emma have learned enough from the "toys" and proceed on their own, especially after Scott discovers the "Jabberwocky" poem in a copy of "Through the Looking-Glass." In the final scene, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary Sunday, while their father watches in shock and disbelief, the children, without fear, hesitation or regret, simply fade away, "crossing over" to that other dimension. "They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone."

"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is a brilliant story, but it is now very dated, both in style and in substance. Any modern film adaptation would of necessity be pretty much a complete rewrite, and "The Last Mimzy" is just that. It's also explicitly a "family film," and as such, the creepy, nightmare-in-bright-daylight quality of the original story is completely gone. "The Last Mimzy" is rather tame, sweet, optimistic and light, not to mention pretty clichéd: It's an eco-fable crossed with that old, rather tired plot device about how the human race, in the near or far future, has been vitiated by pollution, inbreeding, eugenics gone bad, nuclear holocaust, etc., and they need somehow to capture the vitality of the old, undomesticated human race and reinfuse it into their genetic stock. There have been so many SF novels, stories, films and TV shows with this theme that I'm having trouble coming up with titles, but the two I can think of right away are "The 4400" and a film from about 20 years ago called "Millennium," which was based on a book of the same title that I actually read before the movie was made.

The only element preserved from "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is that a boy in the present comes upon some "toys" sent from the future, and, with his younger sister, discovers their unusual properties. Everything else is different. It's a rather sweet story in its own way, and the child actors, especially little Rhiannon Leigh Wryn as Emma, are very engaging. Probably the part of the film that works least well is the subplot that gets Homeland Security into the act, in a rather contrived effort to introduce some suspense into the story. Instead of having the children cross into another dimension, a computerized rabbit doll, Mimzy, goes back into the future bearing with "her" Emma's tears with their trace of genetic material, which of course became the basis for the regeneration of the entire human race. If you can overlook this silliness and just let the movie roll over you, you'll enjoy this mostly pleasant but inconsequential entertainment.

Break out your books of hoary sea phrases, laddies and lassies, it's "At World's End," the third and (we hope) final installment of "Pirates of the Caribbean." Me 11-year-old daughter did think that this movie was "awesome," me buckos, but even she thought it was too long, just shy of three hours, and both of us had trouble following the plot. After about half an hour, I lost track of the dizzying succession of moves and countermoves, plots and counterplots, crosses and double-crosses. And it turns out that there was a post-credits scene that we missed, so ready were we to get out of there after the film ended. Unfortunately, constructing a comprehensible plot line seems to have been a lower priority---and got less of the budget---than the costumes, sets, special effects, and score, all of which seemed intended to assault the senses. I was disappointed to see that for all the effort at creating "realistic" visuals, the movie starts out with an anachronism: It opens in a Chinese bath house in Singapore, and soon after, British soldiers in the employ of the East India Company attack. Now, everything about the "Pirates" films---the clothing styles, the ships, the technology, the historical references---places them squarely in the much-romanticized Golden Age of Piracy. But owing to a major crackdown by Britain and the other European powers, this period was pretty much over by the 1720s. The British colony of Singapore would not be established by the British East India Company for another century (1819). Before that, it was an undistinguished fishing village inhabited by native Malays, not by the Chinese, who came in after the British.

But no matter: "At World's End" fairly drips (and I mean drips) with atmosphere, me hearties. There are more than enough pirate ships, creaking decks, steam-filled bath houses, stormy seas, long hair, shaven heads, leather, bad teeth, sweat, scarred, craggy faces, false eyeballs, powdered wigs, scimitars and sabers, whizzing cannon and pistol balls, splintering wood, fantastic monsters, and heathen spirits to go around. Great sea battles are fought in which ships are blown up with such frequency and regularity that you wonder that anything is left afloat, yet the characters hardly seem to notice. You can tell when the big action scenes are beginning, because when they do, it always starts to rain.

Johnny Depp's semi-dandified portrayal of Jack Sparrow, and his faux British accent, are definitely wearing thin. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, by playing it straight, are much more enjoyable. But to have their characters marry each other in the middle of an all-out sea battle (in the rain, of course) stretches credulity way past the snapping point. Yo ho ho, lots of exasperated scoffing from the audience we were among here, cap'n. Geoffrey Rush is essentially doing a modified Long John Silver impersonation as Captain Barbossa. Keith Richards plays Captain Teague, Jack Sparrow's father and the keeper of the Pirates' Code for the Brethren Court. It is shocking to see his old, lined, craggy face; he has a "smoker's face" and a "smoker's voice." I have always figured that it would not be the drugs of his youth that would kill him, but rather his tobacco abuse. Chow Yun-Fat, who despite his history of acting in extremely violent films is a very likable actor, mugs so outrageously for the camera in his role as Sao Feng that it reminded me of James Finlayson in the old Laurel and Hardy movies. And half a century of BBC costume dramas notwithstanding, nobody really sounded like that, mateys; the familiar "standard" British accent, with its dropped R's and its forward-shifted vowels, did not gain any general currency in Britain until the 19th century; before that, it was actually considered vulgar.

This film definitely looks and sounds impressive on the big screen, but if you wait till it comes out on video, you'll be able to take breaks when it all gets to be too much, and you'll also be able to run it back and watch parts again when you are trying to figure out what on earth is going on. (Maybe they planned it that way.) What really depresses me is that for most of the prodigiously ignorant American children of the past few generations, this is as close as they will ever get to Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, or Daniel Defoe.

Four million years ago, a small band of hominids scrabbles out a living on the African veldt. They face extinction. Then one morning, they awaken to the presence in their midst of a 4-meter-high monolith of unknown origin and purpose. The monolith subtly alters their behavior, leading them to the concept of tool use, by which they defeat a rival band. Violence assures survival. Jump forward to the year 2001. There are two bases on the Moon, one American and one Soviet. In the course of a magnetometric lunar survey, Americans scientists discover a large magnetic anomaly below the surface of the crater Tycho. When excavated, it turns out to be---you guessed it---a monolith, just like the one that, unbeknownst to the Americans, appeared on Earth four million years before. Except for a single, extremely powerful, radio transmission aimed at Jupiter, the monolith remains completely inert, its composition, origin and purpose a total mystery. The Americans undertake a mission to Jupiter. The spaceship Discovery carries the pilot, Dave Bowman, the copilot, Frank Poole, and the 3-man survey team, who are in cryosleep for most of the voyage. The Discovery is run by a powerful supercomputer, an HAL 9000, known as "Hal." Only Hal knows the true mission objective, and the conflict between his instructions to provide totally correct service and his instructions to keep the mission objective secret from the crew causes him to go "insane." He attempts to kill everyone in the crew, but Bowman manages to survive and to disable Hal while still keeping the Discovery functional. Bowman reaches Jupiter space and discovers a huge monolith orbiting the planet, identical to the one on the Moon only much larger. He approaches the monolith in one of Discovery's EVA pods, and discovers that it is a Stargate. He is swept across unimaginable distances and then undergoes a transformation into the next stage of human evolution, a Star Child.

The New Yorker film reviewer called "2001" "some kind of a great film." How have the years treated it?

Technology: In the 1960s, big, one-of-a-kind computers were the norm, and it was natural to think that this would still be the case in 2001. It was not until the early 1970s that the first attempts were made to run factories, laboratories, power plants, etc., using a big central computer, and these were failures. The old mainframes turned out to be unreliable and prone to breakdowns. It was then that the first distributed small computers were tried, with much greater success. It would be 15 years before the first high-speed microprocessors would transform the computer world into what we have now. Also, a lot of the machines, cameras, displays and readouts that we see throughout the film use long-obsolete technology or simply never developed as they appear in the movie.

Culture: "2001" was a world in which technology, science and computers had drained the world of passion and pleasure. This was a predominant fear in the 1960s: The dehumanizing effects of impersonal technology and artificial intelligence. Of course, in the 21st century, the opposite has happened: We have adapted computers and communications to the expression, not the suppression, of our human foibles.

Science: Since the 1960s, the age of Robert Ardrey and "African Genesis," paleoanthropology has tended to discredit the notion that the crucial transition from hominid to human was the evolution of violent, predatory behavior as being too simplistic.

Business: Of course, Pan American Airways, the Bell Telephone Company, General Foods, and other companies whose logos we see in the film, that looked so convincing then, either no longer exist or have been transformed out of all recognition.

Politics: In "2001," both the USA and the USSR have lunar bases. Now, of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, we have not been back to the moon since 1972, and space exploration is much more international than ever.

"2001" was co-written by director Stanley Kubrick and the great SF author Arthur C. Clarke. Youngsters used to modern CGI technology would do well to remember that "2001" was the very first science fiction film to have really believable special effects. Compare earlier "classic" SF films---e.g., "The War of the Worlds," "Forbidden Planet," and "This Island Earth"---and you'll see what I mean. "2001" dazzled us in the 1960s, and it has aged well. Although it is dated in many ways---something that seemed unimaginable when it was first released---it still tells a wonderful story of transcendental human transformation, which has been one of Clarke's favorite themes. It is still one of the masterpieces not just of science fiction film, but of cinema in general.

"Yentl" is based on the story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" by the late Isaac Bashevis Singer, the last great Yiddish author. Yentl is the bright, intelligent daughter of Reb (Rabbi) Mendl, a widower, played by the great Nehemiah Persoff. She looks after her father's household and almost by osmosis learns the Torah (Pentateuch) and the Talmud by listening to the lessons of the young men who come to study with her father. She also wants to become a Jewish scholar, but in the rigidly patriarchal society of Eastern European Jewry, only boys are allowed to study. After her father's death, she decides to disguise herself as a boy to get into a yeshiva (school). Now going by the name Anschel, she succeeds in getting into a yeshiva, and becomes close friends, and eventually falls in love, with fellow student Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin; Avigdor is Hebrew for "father protects"), who is in an arranged betrothal to a beautiful young woman named Hadass (Amy Irving). But when Hadass's family learns Avigdor's brother committed suicide, the wedding is called off. Yentl/Anschel is then selected to marry Hadass. Avigdor supports this, because he sees this as a way to remain close to his friend Anschel (Yentl) and Hadass. Yentl/Anschel goes through with the marriage, and manages by clever subterfuge to live with Hadass but never consummate the marriage or reveal "himself" to be a woman. Eventually, Yentl/Anschel and Avigdor go away for a few days, and Yentl/Anschel reveals her secret to him. But rather than accepting her as a woman and returning her love, Avigdor rejects her. Avigdor returns to Hadass, and the movie ends with Yentl on a ship to (we suppose) America to make a new start, where presumably she will change her name to Fanny Brice and become a big star in vaudeville, then years later, as an old woman, be reduced to visiting Max Bialystock's office for some lovin'.

Visually, "Yentl" looks perfect. The village, the landscape, the people, their language and dress, are a convincing reconstruction of the lost world of the shtetl and its denizens. The actors look perfect, too, although there are problems: It's a stretch to believe that Barbra Streisand could pass herself off as a boy for an extended period, but if the Hilary Swank character in "Boys Don't Cry" could do it, I guess we can suspend disbelief for the duration of "Yentl." Streisand puts in a capable performance, as do Mandy Patinkin and the actors in the other major roles. You have to figure that Hadass was pretty dumb to be hoodwinked the way she was, but I guess that's supposed to be part of the "charm" of the story.

However, "Yentl" suffers from a major problem: The music. What cabbagehead decided that Michel Legrand would be the right composer for this movie?!? His score was completely inappropriate, and Streisand's constant singing under the action drove me crazy. Barbra, shut up once in a while and let the action speak for itself! It was like "Fiddler on the Roof" collides with "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," and that's the kind of road accident I'd rather not see. I suppose that in order to get the project made, Streisand had to agree to sing in the film. Would making "Yentl" into a typical musical, à la "Fiddler," have ruined it? Probably a whole lot less than it was ruined by Legrand's music. After all, "Fiddler," which came out 12 years before "Yentl," had a number of dark moments as well as some light and humorous scenes, and the songs worked. But the score of "Fiddler on the Roof" deliberately used musical motifs and themes derived from and inspired by the rich musical tradition of Eastern European Jewry. They should have stuck with that very serviceable approach. The clash of the music and the rest of the film is a fatal flaw from which "Yentl" does not recover.

This film was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies. It is a small, fairly tame comedy about an unfailingly good-natured, utterly artless and guileless country postman, Harold Petts (Spike Milligan), who nevertheless possesses a natural intelligence and apparently superhuman mail-sorting skills. He is transferred from his village in the country to London, where in the course of the film he thwarts---almost by accident---two robberies, outperforms the automatic sorting equipment installed by the postal branch where he works, and gets the girl (Barbara Shelley). This is a low-budget affair, rather drab-looking, and of course quite dated. It is of interest primarily because it is one of those rare opportunities here in the States to see the late, great Spike Milligan, who is virtually unknown on the American side of the Atlantic. This must have been bread-and-butter work for Milligan, who keeps his manic tendencies more or less under control in this film, although he allows himself some impish smiles from time to time. If you didn't know who Milligan was, you'd never guess he was the mad, eccentric genius who created The Goon Show for the BBC and who became as well known for his mental instability as for his comic invention. The great actor John Wood, who achieved much greater stardom on stage than on screen, where he was mainly a serviceable supporting actor, plays Police Constable Woods, who winds up on the receiving end of most of the mishaps on screen. I remember him best as Professor Falken in "WarGames." You will also recognize Barbara Shelley, whose natural sexiness was never really exploited the way it would be today, from "Village of the Damned" and the Hammer film originally titled "Quatermass and the Pit," but invariably shown here in the USA as "Five Million Years to Earth." An incidental note: Milligan couldn't resist writing a Goon Show that parodied the Quatermass films, called "Quatermass O.B.E.", where of course Ned Seagoon (played by Harry Secombe) was the Quatermass character. It even used an eerie electronic sound effect borrowed from one of the films.

Roger Ebert gave "Crumb" four stars, so we rented it. According to his review, the filmmaker, Terry Zwigoff, has known Robert Crumb for many years, and was as depressed and suicidal during the making of the film as Robert Crumb has been at times in his life.

Robert Crumb is a true, tortured eccentric, who found salvation in his art; the fact that he also found fame is almost secondary. By contrast, his brothers, Charles and Max, are basket cases. They were the children of an active monster (their father) and a passive, colluding monster (their mother). There were two sisters, who declined to participate in this film. As Mad Magazine was of the Fifties, so Zap Comics and Robert Crumb's cartoons and artwork were subversive, anarchic emblems of the psychedelic Sixties, although as the film abundantly details, he himself was never really of that world.

After half an hour of this film, we were saying, "Wow, how fascinating!" After an hour, we were saying, "Okay, I've seen enough of Charles and Max." After an hour and a half, we were pleading, "Have mercy!" By the end of this two-hour film, we were feeling as if we'd been tortured by burial under heavy rocks. We came to the end with great relief.

I instinctively understand Robert Crumb, but two hours of Crumb's profound cynicism, his indefatigable negativity, his misanthropy and misogyny, his interminable kvetching---not to mention the ramblings of his brothers and various friends, former lovers and associates---is about an hour too long. A skillful editor could take this material and cut it down to a one-hour special for cable that would be a masterpiece. As it is, it drags on and on and on and on and on and on. Too much of anything, even Robert Crumb, is too much.

I saw Heartland when it was first released in 1980 and I have just seen it again. It improves with age. Heartland is not just for lovers of "indie" films. At a time when most American films are little more than cynical attempts to make money with CGI, pyrotechnics, and/or vulgarity, Heartland holds up as a slice of American history. It is also a reminder of how spoiled most of us modern, urbanized Americans are.

Nothing in this film is overstated or stagey. No one declaims any Hollywood movie speeches. The actors really inhabit their roles. This really feels like a "small" film but really it is bigger than most multizillion-dollar Hollywood productions.

The film is based on the lives of real people. In 1910, Elinore Randall (Conchata Ferrell, who has never done anything better than this), a widow with a 7-year-old daughter Jerrine (Megan Folsom), is living in Denver but wants more opportunities. She advertises for a position as housekeeper. The ad is answered by Clyde Stewart (Rip Torn, one of our most under-appreciated actors), a Scots-born rancher, himself a widower, with a homestead outside of Burnt Fork, Wyoming. Elinore accepts the position (seven dollars a week!) and moves up to Wyoming with her daughter. She and her daughter move into Stewart's tiny house on the property. It is rolling, treeless rangeland, a place of endless vistas where the silence is broken only by the sounds made by these people and their animals. It's guaranteed to make a person feel small. The three characters go for long periods without seeing another human soul. What is worse, Stewart turns out to be taciturn to the point of being almost silent. "I can't talk to the man," Elinore complains to Grandma Landauer. "You'd better learn before winter," replies Grandma. Grandma (Lilia Skala) is one of the only two other characters who are seen more than fleetingly. She came out to Wyoming from Germany with her husband many years before and runs her ranch alone now that she is also widowed. Grandma is their nearest neighbor (and the local midwife) and still she lives ten miles away! The other supporting character is Jack the hired hand (Barry Primus).

Elinore's routine (and her employer's) is one of endless, backbreaking labor, where there are no modern conveniences and where everything must be made, fixed or done by hand. This is the real meat of the film: Watching the ordinary life of these ranchers as they struggle against nature to wrest a living from the land. But despite the constant toil and fatigue, Elinore is always looking for other opportunities. She learns that the tract adjacent to Stewart's is unclaimed. Impulsively, she files a claim on the property (twelve dollars, or almost two weeks' pay!), meaning that if she lives on it (and she must actually live there) and works it for ten years, she will get the deed to it. Naturally, Stewart learns what she has done. With merciless logic, he points out that with no money, no livestock, no credit, and no assets, she has no chance of succeeding. He then offers a solution: He proposes marriage. The stunned Elinore realizes that this is the only real alternative, and accepts.

We think that Stewart's proposal is purely Machiavellian---he wants the land and the free labor---but we see that, in fact, he is genuinely fond of Elinore, and they grow together as a couple. She becomes pregnant; she goes into labor in the middle of a midwinter blizzard; Clyde travels for hours on horseback through the storm the ten miles to Grandma's and the ten miles back, only to announce that Grandma wasn't there. This is more like real life than is pleasant, folks. Elinore has the baby all by herself, with no help whatsoever. Their son is still an infant when he gets sick and dies. They lose half their livestock to the vicious winter. They struggle on. The last sequence in the film is supposed to be optimistic: The birth of a calf. Clyde calls Elinore urgently to help him deliver the calf. Instead of being head first, the calf is in a footling breech presentation. He and Elinore must physically pull the calf out of the birth canal. There is no CGI, animatronics, trickery, fakery or special effects: What you see is what happened, folks: A calf is born on a bed of straw in a wooden barn by lamplight. With that, the film does not so much end as simply stop, leaving the viewer unsatisfied, but after a while you appreciate the film as a whole, not just for its ending.

This little gem rewards patience and thoughtfulness. It will be watchable long after most of the films of the last generation have long been forgotten.

I'm a physician. Are doctors just as human and fallible as everybody else? Without a doubt. Can they have troubled, messy, disorderly personal lives? Absolutely. Can they act irrationally and make mistakes? You bet. Do they experience uncertainty, fear, anxiety and insecurity? Yes indeed. Does that mean "Grey's Anatomy" is true to life? No way.

Not a MOMENT of this piece of Hollywood claptrap---either medical moments or personal moments---rings true. Surgical interns sleeping with attendings on the night before their first day on the job? Residents sleeping on gurneys in the hallway? Where are the call rooms? ATTENDINGS ARE SLEEPING IN THEM? ATTENDINGS SLEEP AT HOME!!! Surgeons taking care of seizure patients! When he gets into trouble, the ATTENDING ASKS INTERNS FOR HELP INSTEAD OF CALLING A NEUROLOGY CONSULT? Attending surgeons SHAVING THE SCALPS OF SURGICAL PATIENTS which is what nurses are paid to do? Interns talking to attendings in a way that INTERNS NEVER DO! Attendings ordering interns off cases in front of other interns? IT NEVER HAPPENS! A patients who was discharged a month ago and is still in the hospital and who SINGS to get people to do what she wants? Get real.

There is a strict pecking order in medical training; whatever level you're at in the hierarchy, you live in terror of everyone above you. You speak when spoken to and you try not to look like an idiot. While these shows may attempt to show you what modern medicine LOOKS like, the resemblance to actual medical experience ends there.

You want fantasy? Ditch "Grey's Anatomy" and watch "Scrubs." It's a comedy, and if you want realistic medical practice, you won't find it here. Nevertheless, although "Scrubs" makes no pretense of objective realism, I watch it and enjoy it. Why? Because "Scrubs", better than any of the other shows I've seen recently, and certainly a LOT better than "Grey's Anatomy," actually manages to capture the inner life of medical residents by externalizing not the REALITY, but the SURreality you so often encounter or feel in the process of postgraduate medical education.

So far nothing really great except some intriguing special effects. "Derivative" is written all over this series, and while that's not bad per se, so far I haven't seen much that's too promising except some big voices in ocean water. Reference Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg in the series opener: Seemingly unrelated events occur in widely separate locations all over the world that are obviously ominous because we know they have to be, because we're watching them. The military gets involved, reference Close Encounters and others. We're introduced to the main characters, a tough-talking female marine biologist played by Lake Bell (were her parents hippies? Does she have a brother named Mountain?) whom I am trying but not quite succeeding to like, and a regular guy played by Jay R. Ferguson who was born in Dallas so he actually may have the accent he's speaking with. They're thrown together by circumstance so we have another male-female pair/team, reference Roy and Jillian in Close Encounters, Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, Baldwin and Skouris in The 4400, etc., etc. Other mysterious agents of the powers-that-be appear, reference Peter Coyote in E.T. In a reference to Alien, two preadolescence boys find a cache of eggs at the beach and put one in their aquarium. It hatches into a sort-of-cute little amphibious lizard like creature that they keep in the bathtub (another reference to E.T.). We figure that this is a young of oceangoing creatures that are appearing all over the world and are more than 200 feet long, so the eggs are WAY too small to hold the hatchling of such a huge creature. They should be at least as big as a football, probably bigger, but then you couldn't advance the plat by putting one in a big aquarium, could you? More ominous developments occur in the Caribbean when we see a shower of meteorites that we suspect are really vehicles depositing more creatures and/or their eggs on Earth (reference Day of the Triffids).

We'll see.

As a physician, I can tell you that most "doctor shows" are garbage. From "Dr. Kildare" and "Ben Casey," right through "The Interns", the infamous "Medical Center," "Quincy," "St. Elsewhere", "Chicago Hope", "ER," the abysmally bad "Crossing Jordan" and "Grey's Anatomy" (see my review), etc., the shows are more about Hollywood than about healing. The producers and writers watch Dateline and read Discover magazine and trot out medical oddities and the latest antics of their beyond-the-fringe L.A. friends and other lunatics who get into the media, things that never happen in "real" life. (This applies to movies as well, such as the ridiculous "Flatliners" and the offensively atrocious "Lorenzo's Oil.") Instead, you see a lot of interns, residents, attendings, nurses, and their patients behaving in ways that never happen in real medical settings.

You know what I'm talking about, or should: Patients who indulge in eloquent monologues about their lives and problems in the middle of a busy emergency room…Doctors who bark, "He's not dead until I SAY he's dead!"…Medical students who miss their medical school graduation ceremony because they're hanging around in the ER taking care of a sick patient (puh-lease!)…a hospital where the chairman of Internal Medicine routinely rounds with the team, and when he can't do it, the chairman of Surgery takes over!...hospitals where the medicine and surgery residents mingle freely in a way that NEVER happens in a real teaching center, where they generally have little or nothing to do with each other...and on and on. I remember an episode of the mercifully short-lived series "The Human Factor" where a male medical student was challenged by a female medical student to really try to experience a pregnant woman's discomfort, so he put on one of those artificial pregnant "bellies" and WORE IT TO ROUNDS! In real life, after everyone stopped laughing (except the attending physician, who would be furious), a student who did that would get a royal ream job from his senior resident, or his attending, or maybe even the Dean of Students, and get (best outcome) a reprimand in his file, or (worst outcome) suspended or expelled from medical school. His superiors would seriously doubt his sanity, not to mention his intelligence. The purpose of rounds is WORK: Taking care of sick patients. Anything that distracts from that is viewed with extreme displeasure.

Then there are the medical students who address their superiors (residents and attendings) as peers and equals and dispute points of ethics or morality with them. How many times have you seen that? In reality, there is a strict pecking order in medical training; students, interns and lower-year residents live in terror of everyone above them. You speak when spoken to and try not to look like an idiot. You're not interested in the higher things; you're interested in SURVIVAL, mainly your own, and after that, your patients'.

So why do I enjoy "Scrubs" so much? Someone once described the Case Rounds at Massachusetts General Hospital as combining the worst parts of a horse-race and a hanging. Having been through that adventure in applied sadomasochism known as medical education, I can tell you that that assessment applies to medical education in general. If you want realistic medical practice, you won't find it here. I enjoy "Scrubs" because although the show makes no pretense of objective realism, it achieves something few other doctor shows have achieved: It actually manages to capture the inner life of medical residents by externalizing not the REALITY, but the SURreality you so often encounter or feel in the process of medical education.

This is the first and as far as I can tell, the only completed production of "Heart of Darkness" ever released. Prior to starting on "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles shot some test footage for a version of "Heart of Darkness" that was to be filmed entirely in what would now be called "POV", where we would see everything from the point of view of the main character Charlie Marlow; he would be seen only fleetingly in mirrors, windows, water, etc. The film was never made. The "POV" technique was used, not too successfully, in 1947 in "The Lady in the Lake," with Robert Montgomery starring as Philip Marlowe. Presumably, the coincidence of the two "Marlow(e)" characters is just that. Of course, Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" was based on "Heart of Darkness."

The short novel "Heart of Darkness" by the Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad, first serialized in a British literary magazine in 1899, features one of his favorite alter egos, ship captain Charlie Marlow, who also narrates the short story "Youth" and indirectly tells the story of "Lord Jim." Marlow, temporarily out of work, decides to take a job captaining a river boat for a Belgian company involved in the brutal exploitation of the resources of King Leopold II's personal fiefdom, the cruelly misnamed Congo Free State. Marlow travels from London to Brussels, signs on with the company, and is told that his mission is to take a boat up the Congo River to a far inland station headed by one of the company's most productive agents in the colony, a German named Kurtz. Shipments of ivory, latex (for the production of rubber) and other products from Kurtz's station have ceased, and no word has come downriver from Kurtz for some time. There are rumors that he has "gone native." Marlow is to investigate, take any necessary action, and make a report on his return. He takes passage down the West African coast to the mouth of the Congo, is delayed for weeks while he is forced to repair his boat at the company station on the coast, and finally sets out upriver to find Kurtz's station. The river, the heat, the vegetation, the wildlife, the insects, the people, all take their toll on his endurance, his imagination, and his mental resources. He finds Kurtz ill, half-mad, and close to death. The final encounter and the death of Kurtz are almost an anticlimax, especially since Conrad is so obscure about what actually happens that we are left to puzzle it out for ourselves. This is a novel where you close the book vaguely dissatisfied with the ending but nevertheless treasuring the story for its amazing atmospherics.

This "Heart of Darkness" was filmed with Guyana in Central America standing in for West Africa. It is best where the novel is at its greatest disadvantage: Actually showing us First World urbanites what a boat trip up a tropical river would look like. But the rest of the film was forgettable. Tim Roth does his best as Marlow, but so much about the plot, characterizations, and character relationships has been altered beyond recognition that you wonder why they bothered. If the aim was to make Conrad's story for the screen, why didn't they leave it alone? It's unreasonable to expect that no compromises will be made when a book is made into a movie, but so many changes were made that to me had no cinematic justification that you wonder whether we are simply dealing with incompetent screenwriters and cinematographers. Most disappointing of all was John Malkovich as Kurtz. He was completely miscast and simply flubs the role. Everything about him is wrong: His looks, his acting style, his voice, his accent, everything. A vastly better choice would have been someone like Bruno Ganz (unlike Malkovich, an actual German, like the character).

This is a very disappointing production and I would recommend it only after you've read the book if you want to depend on more than your imagination to get a visual picture of a boat trip up the Congo River circa 1900.